A Different Way of Knowing

Once when I was consulting with the staff of a Navajo school I would sometimes see an old Indian man striding implacably across the desert. With his wrinkled face and flowing white hair he looked the very picture of a seer. I asked my teacher friend Calvin about him. “That’s John Whitehorse,” Calvin said. “There are many stories about him.”

“Tell me one,” I said. Calvin thought a moment, then told me: “My cousin’s driving to town one day and comes across John Whitehorse. He stops and asks him if he wants a ride. ‘No thanks,” the old man says, ‘I’m in a hurry.’ My cousin drives on, and a mile down the road he has a flat. He gets out to change it, only to find his spare tire is flat, too! He sits down to wait. Pretty soon here comes John Whitehorse, walking straight on by without a word. Hours later when my cousin gets to town the old man is long gone.”

How did the old man know? Whatever he had, we could really use the skill in our lives and work. Things are moving so fast we need a whole new way of learning things. That new way would need to meet the following criteria:

• It would not rely on sensory data from which to draw inferences.
• It would look beyond outside facts as being too small and short-lived.
• It would transcend temporal and spatial limits.

The only kind of learning that fulfills these criteria is learning by intuition. Most of us have flashes of intuition but have never learned to trust and train this inner way of knowing. Yet more and more business articles are focusing on the need for leaders and organizations to develop intuition in order to respond quickly and effectively to rapid changes.

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that most of us have formed a lifelong habit of trusting exclusively in one way of knowing--inferring from sensory data. The good news is that we do have what John Whitehorse had. Far from something outside us that must be added, it is a “sleeping giant” within us, a hidden source of wisdom just waiting to be tapped.

Nature of Intuition
What is intuition? In his Autobiography of A Yogi, the great Indian teacher Paramahansa Yogananda wrote:

Intuition is that directly perceiving faculty of the soul that at once knows the truth about anything, requiring no medium of sense experience or reason. It does not consist in believing a thing, but in knowing it directly and unmistakably. It does not contradict. It is always supported by a right sense of perception, reason, and inference, although it does not depend upon any data whatsoever offered by the senses or the mind. A real intuition can never be wrong. Everyone possesses this quality more or less. Like any faculty, it must be cultivated.

That last phrase--”it must be cultivated”--is the kicker. Most of us are so focused on data perceived by way of the senses that we tend to mistrust what comes to us any other way. This means we miss the inner signals when they are there.

The only way to train ourselves to tune in to these signals is to do what John Whitehorse obviously had done: undertake a long-term project of self-study and perceptual tinkering. We must train ourselves to recognize the ways intuition signals us. Each of us is different, so each must train him/herself to identify the particular pathways by which this hidden knowing comes to us. This tuning-in cannot be done while we are hurrying and scurrying. We must learn to create, grab, or steal opportunities to be quiet and “inquire within.”

Some Guidelines

• Seek solitude
The world will not give you this; you have to value alone-time enough to carve it out for yourself. Without periods of interiorized reflection, your mind remains in a constant state of restlessness.

• Develop calmness
The scripture says, “Be still and know that I am God.” The more still you become, the better you can tune in with the Source.

• Learn to meditate
Saints and sages over millennia have claimed that meditation is the only way to train the intuition. “Meditation,” someone has said, “is the only way to get out of your movie, and realize that it is a movie.”

• Keep attention on the heart.
Intuition, Yogananda taught, is perceived mostly through the heart. Whenever you are concerned about something, or trying to find the right course to pursue, calmly concentrate on the region of the heart.

• Question reality.
The enemy of intuition is the ego. By being willing to give up our “sure things” and be guided by some other way which we’ve not used, we remain trainable.

• Be willing to fail.
Those of us who are primarily mental in our approach to problems might mistake our bursts of intellectual enlightenment for intuition. Creative types might mistake intuition’s “still small voice” for imagination. Individuals who are especially tactile might think they are being led by feelings or sensations.
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